Means for improving encoding/decoding of background sounds, primarily intended for digital cellular telephone systems, have been described in Swedish Patent Applications 93 00290-5 and 93 01798-6. These means are primarily designed to handle a situation where the connection between the speech encoder and the speech decoder is close to ideal, in the sense that no frames are lost. However, in for example the American digital cellular standard IS-54 the Fast Associated Control CHannel (FACCH) is established by stealing speech frames from the traffic channel (a similar channel exists in the European GSM specification). In such a case it may be necessary to modify the methods described in the above Swedish patent applications. A similar situation arises in a packet switched network when packets (frames) are lost or arrive too late to be used for speech generation in real time (the packets may take different routes between sender and receiver).
An object of the present invention is an apparatus and a method in which so called lost frame concealment is applied to the received signal in order to make the speech decoding more robust or insensitive to lost frames.